7 comments on “Today’s FT/Bradman – placeholder for discussion”

  2. In lieu of a brief blog here is an overstuffed comment.

    The only one that really stumped me 4d “Well – fancy Alice finding it there!” which, after Googling, is TREACLE and is a cryptic reference to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

    21d was interesting and I liked it, “Make further changes to read it after dealing with misprint”, as a good &lit. You have to deal with the misprint to get REED IT and then make further changes to get RE-EDIT.

    For 6d “Maiden in summer month on foreign river” I felt sure that it was AUGUSTINA when I found that ther is a river in Poland called the INA but eventually twigged that it was INAUGURAL.

    SESTET was new to me but got it from the wordplay.

    Just to re-open a similar debate (on the appropriateness of using “in *name of country*” to indicate the name of a place in the country) Bradman used “that’s striped” as the definition for ZEBRA. I’ve often seen setters clue things in similar ways by describing them rather than defining them so I’m not sure why the “in *name of country*” stirred up such controversy.

    I can’t recall coming across “ordained” as an angram indicator before and, although it is synonymous with arrange in the “set up” or “decree” sense, I’m not comfortable that it successfully indicates a re-ordering of letters.

    Having said that though, all in all I enjoyed the crossword.

  3. I thought “that’s striped” was quite OK as a definition of ZEBRA. Only niggle was a word that crossed it ie ZAIRE which was a former country name though not indicated as such. It did not hold up solving, however. I liked INAUGURAL too – I was looking for m = maiden for quite a while to be somewhere in the word. Thanks for confirming TREACLE which I did get right. I’m not familiar with those books at all but thought I might have heard of treacle in relation to them.

  4. Many thanks for feedback – I simply have no neighbours who solve this one. Alice was the first book I borrowed from a public library – I can still smell it!

  5. I think descriptor definitions of nouns (like ‘that’s striped’ for zebra) are probably okay in &lit clues, but you would go on safari and say, ‘Look maw, there’s a that’s striped!’.

    Off now to feed the that’s furry.

  6. Maybe the rule-of-thumb that it can be substituted in a sentence does not always apply – if it did, it might rule out a lot of clues where the defn is “It’s…”

  7. Yes, and I am not being entirely serious here. Though it is interesting to me that the leeway given in Ximenean-style puzzles is somehow more acceptable than the same sort of thing – in-deed! – appearing in The Guardian.

    (Or in The Independent, I now concede.)

Comments are closed.